About PDF Forms

PDF Forms: New Hampshire court forms are being presented on the Internet in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). We are currently using Adobe Acrobat 11 Professional to create these forms and are saving to level Adobe Reader X. The Adobe format has been chosen because of its near universal adoption for providing electronic copies of forms where the content and presentation of the document requires consistency. That consistency is not reliably provided using standard web forms. A free viewer is available from Adobe, so this format imposes little financial burden on the user. It is located at http://www.adobe.com

Forms not available in Word: We have chosen not to provide forms in any word processing format because the ability to "lockdown" the form into a standard look and feel is limited at best. The selection of which word processing solution to use to fill out the form can cause inconsistencies. Even the selection of which printer to use to print the form can lead to results that are inconsistent and impractical to process. Users of completed forms (court staff, judges, parties, etc.) expect to see specific content in consistent locations on the form. When that content shifts as a result of printer and word processor anomalies, then the value of standardized forms is diminished.

Filling out Forms: All of these forms can be printed as blank forms and filled in manually if required. All these forms can be saved to local electronic media in their blank state. Users are cautioned that when they pre-print a form for later use or save a copy of a form to local media, they need to make sure that the form has not changed since it was last printed or saved locally. It is the users responsibility to check the court's website for updated forms to avoid using obsolete and outdated forms.

Most of our forms are also capable of being completed electronically through the Adobe viewer, using the TAB key to navigate the form from field to field and keying data into each field. Those forms that are not yet in form filler format will be placed in that format in the future. Using the viewer one can print the form when done. With only the free viewer as the software tool, a user cannot save the completed (or partially completed) form to electronic media. With purchased products such as Adobe's Acrobat, then it is possible to save forms with content included for reuse at a later time.

Accessibility: You can get information regarding the accessibility of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files from Adobe.